The Evolution of Moral Cognition

Abstract:

Many modern approaches to the evolution of mind have claimed that the fundamental
drivers of our cognitive capacities and cultures are genetically specified psychological
adaptations, which evolved in response to evolutionary pressures deep within our
lineage's history. Many of our cognitive capacities are innate. Recent approaches to moral
cognition have similarly argued that moral cognition is innate. In this thesis, I argue that
even though our capacity for moral cognising is an adaptation, it is a learned adaptation.
Moral cognition is not innate. In arguing this thesis I will question many of the
assumptions of traditional cognitive science and evolutionary approaches to the mind. By
incorporating theory and evidence from cognitive science and the philosophy of mind, I
apply the explanatory frameworks of embodied and extended cognition to the domain of
morality: moral cognition is both embodied and extended cognition. This places
particular importance on the role of our bodies and world in the fundamental structuring
and scaffolding of the development and execution of moral cognition. Putting this in an
evolutionary framework, I develop a dual inheritance model of the non-nativist evolution
of moral cognition focusing on the roles of niche construction, biased learning and active
learning in the transfer of moral phenotypes between generations. Morality is a learned
adaptation that evolved through the dynamic and reciprocal interaction between genes
and culture.